The Fallen Angel by David Hewson A Novel (Nic Costa)

Acclaimed author David Hewson returns with this mesmerizing new thriller featuring Nic Costa and the detectives of Rome’s Questura. This time Costa must solve a case with roots buried deep in one of the ancient city’s most infamous episodes—a story of incest, murder, and martyrdom.

It’s August in Rome, and Nic Costa’s vacation is about to be cut short by a scream, a girl covered in blood, and a man lying dead in the Via Beatrice Cenci. It seems that Malise Gabriel, a scholar with an impressive list of enemies, stepped onto faulty scaffolding for a cigarette and fell to his death.

On the surface, it’s no more than an unfortunate accident.

But the deeper Costa looks—into the facts that don’t add up, into the haunted eyes of Gabriel’s beautiful daughter, Mina, and into the mysterious links between the present and the past—the more he’s haunted by disturbing parallels with a centuries-old crime: In 1599, Beatrice Cenci was beheaded by the Vatican for murdering her father, a man known for unthinkable sexual crimes. Does Mina’s obsession with Beatrice intimate her own family’s dark secrets, or is someone using her as a smoke screen for a far deadlier plan?

Soon another body is discovered and Nic comes to doubt his own first impressions. Something evil is circling Mina, her angry and silent mother, her runaway brother, and her family’s checkered history in England, the United States, and Italy. And now that something is closing in fast for the kill.

In a novel that captures modern Rome in all its complexity, as well as its history of beauty and barbarity, genius and blindness, The Fallen Angel is David Hewson at his best—a twisting and twisted contest between innocence and evil.

David Hewson is the author of ten novels. Formerly a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times, he lives in Kent, England, where he is at work on his next crime novel, Bitter Mountain.From the Hardcover edition.

Unrated Critic Reviews for The Fallen Angel

Kirkus Reviews

Moreover, the fatal fall ended on the pavement of the Via Beatrice Cenci, causing an immediate media frenzy, compounded by the persona of Mina herself: 17, exquisite, reliably reputed to be as virginal as Shelley’s heroine, and no less justified in parricide, given an unspeakably abusive father.

Publishers Weekly

Near the start of Hewson's accomplished ninth novel featuring Roman detective Nic Costa (after City of Fear), an eccentric English scholar, Malise Gabriel, falls to his death from a balcony, and Nic finds the man's lovely 17-year-old daughter, Mina, kneeling over his body on the street.

Book Reporter

Indeed, the similarities with that remote incident --- commemorated to this day --- and Gabriel's death make for an uncomfortable comparison for Costa, who is in the position of comforting Gabriel's teenage daughter, Mina, at the scene of her father's death.